A short explanation of one number
Fineness, and why .800 is not 80 grams
Fineness is the single most misread figure in coin collecting. It is a proportion of weight, not a weight, and a coin that is 80 per cent silver is only worth knowing about once you also know what it weighs.
What it measures
Fineness is the proportion of a coin’s weight that is the precious metal. The rest is an alloying metal, almost always copper, which is there because pure silver is too soft to survive circulation. A coin struck in pure silver would be unreadable within a few years.
So .800 silver means eight hundred parts in a thousand, by weight, are silver. It does not mean eight hundred of anything else, and it says nothing at all about how much silver is in the coin until you know the coin’s weight. A .925 coin can easily hold less silver than a .500 one if the .925 coin is small enough, and in Canadian coinage it frequently does.
Four ways of writing it
The same number appears in four notations, and all of them mean the same thing. The Mint writes the percentage. The bullion trade writes the decimal. Older catalogues write parts per thousand. Silversmiths say sterling.
- 92.5% silver is .925 is 925 parts per thousand is sterling
- 80% silver is .800 is 800 parts per thousand, the Canadian coinage standard from 1920
- 50% silver is .500 is 500 parts per thousand, the last silver standard Canada struck
This site writes the decimal, because that is what a buyer will quote at you, and shows the Mint’s own percentage wording alongside it on every specification table.
Turning fineness into silver
Two numbers give you the answer, and both are published: the standard weight and the fineness. Multiply them and divide by a troy ounce, which is 31.1034768 grams by definition.
The result is called actual silver weight, and it is the only silver figure this site uses. Where a page says a coin holds 0.1500 troy ounces, that number was calculated when the page was built, from the two figures shown in the same table. It was not typed in.
Why Canada used .800
Canadian coinage was sterling, at .925, until 1920, and then dropped to .800. The reason was the same one that drove the change again in the 1960s: the price of silver rose to the point where a sterling coin was worth more as metal than as money, and a government that lets that happen watches its coinage disappear.
Lowering the fineness while keeping the weight is the cheaper of the two available fixes, and it is the one Canada reached for first in 1920 and again in 1967. Only when that stopped working was silver removed altogether.
Every standard Canada struck, side by side
The bar under each standard shows the proportion of the coin’s weight that is silver. The column on the right shows why fineness alone tells you very little.
| Fineness | Proportion | Struck in | Lightest coin | Heaviest coin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| .925 | 92.5% by weight | 5 cents, 10 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents | 0.0347 ozt5 cents | 0.3456 ozt50 cents |
| .800 | 80% by weight | 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents, 1 dollar | 0.0300 ozt5 cents | 0.5993 ozt1 dollar |
| .500 | 50% by weight | 25 cents | 0.0812 ozt25 cents | 0.0812 ozt25 cents |
Read the last two columns against each other and the point is obvious: the range within a single fineness is far wider than the difference between finenesses. Weight does more work than fineness does.
The comparison people get wrong
.925 · 5 cents
0.0347 ozt
1.167 g at 92.5% silver, worth $3.08 today.
.800 · 5 cents
0.0300 ozt
1.167 g at 80% silver, worth $2.66 today.
.500 · 25 cents
0.0812 ozt
5.05 g at 50% silver, worth $7.21 today.
A higher fineness on a smaller coin is not more silver. That is the whole reason this site derives a troy ounce figure for every specification period instead of publishing a table of finenesses and leaving readers to do it.